Clinical trial recruitment regularly suffers from low enrollment—so much so that 85% of all clinical trials fail to meet their initial targets on time. Yet, according to data collected by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Cancer Institute (NCI), plenty of patients express interest in enrolling in studies: 50% accept when given the opportunity.

Awareness is often the culprit, according to data gathered by the NCI, as 41% of Americans report having no knowledge of clinical trials.

However, besides needing expanded outreach, contract research organizations (CROs), trial sponsors, pharmaceutical companies, and other stakeholders also need to evaluate their messaging and engagements at different touchpoints.

Clinical researchers already face a massive undertaking in evaluating whether new treatments are safe and effective. Adding recruitment responsibilities to this already overburdened phase of the process only increases the challenge. Instead of trying to optimize recruitment internally, they need faster and more scalable solutions.

Many find the answer by outsourcing patient recruitment and partnering with expert vendors. If you’re considering the same, you’ll find everything you need to know below.

What Is Outsourced Patient Recruitment?

It’s easy to think of outsourced patient recruitment as just another form of marketing or advertising. However, that perception ignores some of the most important services a recruitment partner can provide.

While outsourced recruitment does involve digital, direct-to-patient (DTP) targeting, it’s crucial that your partner also qualifies and engages patients after the initial touchpoint.

By pre-screening potential participants before enrollment (e.g., through population- and indication-specific messaging, online screening, or phone screening), ineligible individuals can be filtered out much more quickly from clinical trials.

In turn, time and resources can be saved in the overall clinical trial by reducing the need for examinations, laboratory tests, imaging, and other thorough assessments for ineligible participants.

Outsourced patient recruitment vendors also equip trial organizers with the technology needed to accelerate enrollment, such as electronic medical record (EMR) capture and intelligence. And through empathetic, service-minded interactions, patient engagement specialists establish and build upon high-quality first impressions that help foster trust and maintain ongoing participation before pre-qualified candidates ever visit a site.

Put simply, leading outsourced patient recruitment services are DTP, digital-first, and full-service—from marketing campaigns to enrollment and site assistance. Recruiting participants by partnering with expert vendors not only helps clinical trials reach and enroll more participants, but also the right participants.

Why More Clinical Trials Are Turning to Outsourcing

Traditional clinical trial recruitment processes, also known as site-based recruitment, heavily depend on healthcare organizations (HCOs) and healthcare providers (HCPs) referring their patients to studies.

However, these referrals tend to be rarer than people might assume. A survey of physicians and nurses revealed that these professions refer only about 0.2% and 0.04% of their annual patient volumes, respectively, to trial opportunities.

Moreover, as modern clinical trials become increasingly complex and researchers define more specific study parameters, it becomes harder to recruit sufficient sample sizes of the specific patient populations needed from just one site or network. Geography limits site-based recruitment, even when conducting decentralized clinical trials (DCTs).

Managing these recruitment efforts puts more on clinical researchers’ to-do lists and increases the burden on site staff, causing compounding problems. It’s not uncommon for clinical trials approaching the end of their projected timeline to realize they need six months or more just to recruit their sample population at their current enrollment rate. These recruitment challenges prove critical, as the most common cause for terminating a clinical trial is low enrollment.

Key Challenges Outsourcing Helps Solve

To improve recruitment outcomes (e.g., greater randomization and diversity, lower screen failures) and shorten enrollment times, successful clinical trials increasingly partner with specialized recruitment firms.

These firms help CROs, sponsors, and other stakeholders by:

• Expanding reach: DTP and digital-first strategies enable trial organizers to bypass the bottlenecks and limitations of traditional, site-based efforts to recruit participants quickly. For example, a recruitment vendor could enhance patient access through social media ads while also fostering connections with patient organizations and patient advocacy efforts to expand its reach and further develop trust.
• Reducing screen failures: Due to poor messaging and targeting, unclear inclusion and exclusion criteria, and limited direct communication capabilities for screening, research sites often experience high rates of screen failures. However, partnering with an outsourced patient recruiter enables trials to implement more effective pre-screening processes. These cost-effective measures ensure that more qualified patients begin enrollment and complete it—all without altering protocols.
• Providing greater randomization: Sufficient randomization and diverse representation greatly impact the value of study data. However, it can be challenging to find and connect with suitably diverse patient populations. Top recruitment vendors will leverage advanced algorithms to expand their recruitment efforts and reach a diverse array of patients through channels and messaging that have the greatest impact.
• Fostering more personable participant engagement: Patients’ first impressions, experiences, and satisfaction play integral roles in their enrollment and continued trial participation. Partnering with a recruitment vendor that can foster trust, educate participants, assist with patient compliance, and provide recruitment materials through empathetic engagements proves invaluable.

As clinical trials evolve to meet the demands of modern research, outsourcing patient recruitment not only addresses key operational challenges but also opens the door to more patient-centric approaches. Leveraging digital tools enhances accessibility and convenience, especially for underserved or geographically dispersed populations.

When combined with expert strategies for facilitating patient recruitment, sponsors and CROs can accelerate timelines, enhance data quality, and ultimately bring therapies to market more quickly—all while fostering stronger relationships with the patients they serve.

What to Look for in an Outsourced Patient Recruitment Partner

When evaluating an outsourced patient recruitment partner, some essential criteria include:

• Patient engagement approach: Look for partners leveraging advanced algorithms and digital recruitment strategies to target and engage potential participants across diverse channels with empathetic messaging. Follow-ups performed by engagement specialists to better facilitate patient recruitment are also crucial. Because applied clinical trials so often struggle to find patients outside of site-based recruitment, your partner should provide a complementary recruitment approach.
• Workflow integration and site engagement: Despite being an outsourced team, your recruitment partner should have the specialized expertise to seamlessly fit within your existing workflows. They should feel like an extension of your internal team. Additionally, when sites begin to feel overburdened, your partner should be able to step in and help internal operations continue smoothly.
• Secure, compliant data management: Maintaining the security of patients’ electronic protected health information (ePHI) becomes increasingly important for ensuring compliance with HIPAA and other regulations. Equally important, rigorous data security is a vital process for maintaining patient trust and privacy, as well as respecting ethical considerations. Tech-forward recruitment partners always adhere to regulatory standards and best practices, whether facilitating telehealth or gathering data through methods such as EMR capture and intelligence.
• Real-time reporting: Recruitment vendors can’t optimize their approaches without continually collecting and analyzing performance data. Transparent, real-time reporting enables CROs, sponsors, and other stakeholders to readily assess trial performance, identify areas for improvement, and address them effectively.

Of course, the most important criterion is a demonstrable history of successful participant recruitment strategies that support clinical trials.

Ask potential partners for case studies and performance data, such as:

• Overall enrollment increases
• Average enrollment timeline reductions
• Increases in randomizations
• Interested patients following DTP recruitment campaigns
• Contribution percentage of total randomizations

Choosing the right recruitment partner hinges on more than promises—it requires proof. A track record backed by data and case studies ensures you’re aligning with a team that can deliver measurable results.

From boosting overall enrollment to increasing randomizations and optimizing DTP campaign performance, proven success is the clearest indicator that a partner can meet your trial’s specific needs and drive meaningful outcomes.

The AutoCruitment Advantage: Driving Recruitment Outcomes with Speed and Scale

Among potential outsourcing patient recruitment partners, AutoCruitment’s end-to-end services are unmatched.

Starting with global digital targeting, AutoCruitment will launch DTP campaigns with population- and indication-specific messaging that comply with Institutional Review Board (IRB) regulations.

Autocruitment’s past campaigns have generated hundreds of thousands of interested patients, who are directed to customized online screeners with EMR integration that create a top-level eligibility filter.

Following online screening, AutoCruitment’s patient engagement specialists conduct phone screenings to ensure only the most qualified potential participants enter the enrollment process and minimize screen failures. Meanwhile, site engagement staff help reduce the trial’s administrative burden, operating as an extension of CRO and sponsors’ teams.

Finally, AutoCruitment’s patient management portal provides a secure and seamless gateway for completing patient enrollment, capturing informed consent, and equipping researchers with transparent, real-time reporting capabilities.

Outsourcing Success Stories: Real-World Impact

Clinical researchers conducting a pediatric anxiety study discovered that if their enrollment rates continued, it would take 32 months to achieve their target sample size. With only seven months left in their timeline, they needed a solution that could significantly boost enrollment. They turned to AutoCruitment.

AutoCruitment developed a plan that would start raising awareness via digital targeting and online screening to help fill the top of their recruitment funnel. At the same time, site engagement support would assist with the sudden influx.

The campaign managed to generate roughly 62,000 interested patients, which were screened down to 2,945 for additional phone screening. After both rounds of determining eligibility, the research team then had 360 highly qualified patients who had passed multiple layers of screening and who were ready to proceed to the next steps of site visits, consent, and ultimately randomization.

After initially projecting an almost 400% increase in monthly enrollments—from 3.4 patients per month to 15.3—to meet the seven-month timeline, AutoCruitment far surpassed expectations by achieving a 535% increase of 21.6 enrollments per month.

Not only did partnering with AutoCruitment maintain the clinical research team’s initial timeline, but it also helped the successful trial finish two months ahead of schedule.

Modern Clinical Research Requires Modern (Outsourced) Recruitment

CROs, sponsors, and other trial organizers already contend with a considerable workload simply from performing their study.

Adding today’s most pressing recruitment challenges—campaign reach, patient diversity, screen failures, ad hoc site support, and more—overtaxes site staff and jeopardizes the trial’s continuation. Revolutionary medical advancements shouldn’t stall out due to these low enrollments and other challenges.

Conversely, outsourcing patient recruitment to the right partner not only expands and accelerates the entire recruitment process but also delivers measurably improved outcomes and patient satisfaction.

Looking to streamline recruitment for your next study?

Contact AutoCruitment to unlock access to the right patients, faster.